A member of Turkey’s parliament has submitted an unprecedented bill seeking recognition of the Armenian genocide and calling for redress for the descendants of its survivors.

Garo Paylan, a member of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) who is of Armenian descent, last week proposed that parliament officially designate April 24 as a day of mourning, the date viewed by Armenians as the start of the genocide in 1915 in which as many as 1.5 million people perished.

The bill is unlikely to find traction because Turkey vehemently denies that the deportations and massacres of Armenians amounted to a state-orchestrated campaign. It instead argues that both Armenians and Turks were killed in intercommunal fighting amid the chaos of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The modern Turkish Republic was founded on its ashes.

But the proposed legislation is the first time a member of Turkey’s parliament has called for Turkey to recognize the genocide and signals how the debate has evolved in Turkey, which once viewed discussion of the genocide as criminal. Even Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted in 2005 for his remarks about the genocide.

“Seeking to normalize the Armenian genocide by tying it to war, making light of it and denying the events are part of the perpetuation of the official thesis … and has led to hate crimes against minorities throughout the republic’s history,” Paylan said in the draft bill, according to a copy obtained by Eurasianet.

The bill also calls for the establishment of a commission to investigate those responsible for the deportation of Armenians and to remove their names from streets, schools and other public spaces. Many historical figures implicated in the genocide, including its purported architect Mehmed Talaat, are still viewed as national heroes.

Parliament should also confer citizenship on the descendants of survivors who were forced to leave Turkish lands, Paylan’s bill states.

“For Turkey to become a peaceful society, it needs a democratic and just approach to its collective memory,” he said. “Recognizing, condemning and compensating for the crimes committed as Turkey transitioned from an empire to a republic will allow for the construction of a peace-minded memory and, therefore, a society that can live together.”

On Monday, the leader of Paylan’s party, Pervin Buldan, said in a speech in parliament that Armenians “were victims of a great tragedy,” inciting a rebuke from the parliamentary speaker, Ismail Kahraman, a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party: “Turkey did not commit any kind of Armenian massacre, a genocidal massacre is out of the question.”

Most Turks argue that accepting the massacres were a genocide would be admitting a historical lie.

But a growing, albeit still small, number of Turks are joining a handful of grassroot events that have sprung up to mark the grim anniversary. On the 24th, they planned to gather at sites around Istanbul, including the former prison where about 250 prominent Armenians were detained before being deported or killed, marking the start of the genocide.

A ceremony is also planned at the grave of a conscript, Sevag Balikci, who was murdered on April 24, 2011, by a fellow soldier in what his family says was a hate crime because he was an ethnic Armenian.

Taboos surrounding discussion of the genocide have eroded under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has expressed condolences over the loss of life, although he maintains that the killings were not a genocide.

Paylan was censured last year for saying in parliament genocide had claimed the lives of Armenians, Syriac Christians and Greeks in Ottoman lands during World War I.

Some 30 countries, as well as most historians, acknowledge the massacres were a genocide. The Dutch parliament passed a motion recognizing the genocide in February amid diplomatic sparring with Turkey over unrelated matters.

Pre-war census figures show 2 million Armenians, or 40 percent of the population, lived in present-day Turkey, Paylan said. Today, Armenians number just 60,000 in a country of 80 million people.